Backtrack: The Seventh Formation

Backtrack is a series devoted to backtracking to tell short stories about songs I've written.

Back in August 2006, I wrote out a rough 45 seconds or so of ideas in MIDI based around a 7/8 rhythm and tentatively called it "Weird Violence".

A few days later, I started working on another idea; unlike the previous, this one had some legs, and I wound up incorporating the core idea of Weird Violence into one of its sections. By the end it was about five and a half minutes long.

After bringing the song into Reason and cleaning it up, I sensed that it was right up the alley of some of the other music I had been writing at the time; tunes like Jump Error. As a result I decided to include it in my plans for the space concept album that I’d eventually release four years later. The track was called “The Seventh Formation”, a slight nod to the meter of the earliest idea for this song.

The similarities between "The Seventh Formation" and its new counterpart "The New Formation" are heard right away, but as the piece progresses the differences become more apparent. By the end of each track, their relationship to each other is pretty hard to determine. The New Formation only uses a few of the original elements, and takes the material in an entirely new direction.